The World Wide Web (“Web”) has gained widespread popularity as a means for individuals and businesses to locate and purchase a broad range of products and services. The Web sites made available by merchants doing business online vary widely in design, content and sophistication, but most successful electronic commerce sites have certain basic features in common. They typically provide images and/or descriptions of their products or services, they offer the potential customer a means to select a desired product or service and place it in an electronic shopping cart, and they provide a check out process whereby the customer can complete the online transaction.
Many online merchants try to interest the customer in making additional purchases by presenting the customer with information about other products available from the merchant that are related or similar to the product that the customer is viewing or has selected for purchase. To increase the likelihood that these additional products might be of interest to the customer, some prior art electronic commerce systems implement databases or other internal information systems that attempt to identify and correlate related products. On sites of this type, if a customer is examining a description of product A, the site will bring product B to the customer's attention, for example with a message indicating that many customers that purchased product A in the past also purchased product B. Another known approach is to keep track of past purchases of a customer and advise the customer during a future visit to the site of a product related to an earlier customer purchase. These prior art systems merely search among the site's collection of standard products offered to try to locate something that might be of interest to the customer. They do not offer customized and personalized products to the customer.
In the field of Web-based printing, client/server systems have been developed that allow a user to download software tools and design customized documents in the user's browser. One such system is described in co-owned U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,433 entitled “Managing Print Jobs”, which is hereby incorporated by reference. The system described in the above-identified patent discloses a system for downloading and editing pre-designed document templates in the user's browser, but does not disclose or suggest automatically designing and offering custom products to the user.